


To The Youngest Khalifa, With Love

by Fraslis



Category: Haroun and the Sea of Stories - Salman Rushdie
Genre: Gen, Letters, fun fact this was a school assignment, grandpa Rashid writing to his grandson
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-06
Updated: 2018-02-06
Packaged: 2019-03-14 17:15:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 973
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13594674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fraslis/pseuds/Fraslis
Summary: A letter from Rashid to his grandson.





	To The Youngest Khalifa, With Love

**Author's Note:**

> Don't you love writing fic for school assignments  
> I sure do

To the youngest of the Khalifas,  
I am compelled to write you a letter, despite having seen you not so much as a week ago. You are small now, and you won’t come to read this letter for some time, but I still feel the need to convey to you the things I have learned, the things I hope to say to you someday. The stories I hope to tell.  
Your father has been my greatest joy in life, even more so than my tales. I leave it to your father to tell you his story, but I pray that you will listen to mine.  
Our city, which you will always know as the joyful Kahani, spent longer without a name than it has with one. In the old, sad town, I was born, a small boy to sad parents. In all my years growing, I had never seen happiness. I knew not what it was. Life was simply life, existence a neverending magic trick—the kind that you weren’t really interested in, but it was better than sitting outside, waiting for the show to finish.  
Somehow, I always knew there was something greater, though I knew not what it could be. Every day I searched the city for that spark, and every day it eluded me. So I turned to story. I began to write, about how I would go about discovering that spark. In a sewer, curled around a cat’s paw, perhaps deep down that well that my parents wouldn’t let me near. Over time, I began to tell my stories, to the neighborhood children, to the elders who sat in their rocking chairs and knitted blankets until their hearts failed them.  
Stories and stories and stories, on and on and on, never complete. I could never finish those stories. I would fight my way through every obstacle, search every nook and cranny, and I would find that spark in the strangest of places, or perhaps it was right in front of me the whole time, but the stories never continued. I can still hear the calls. “Rashid, Rashid, what was it? What was the spark?”  
I did not know.  
So the stories stayed unfinished, piles of paper scattered about my bedroom, and not an end in sight.  
That was when I decided that, perhaps, my spark was not to be found in my sad city. A young man, full of dreams and incomplete stories, I set out. I traveled through many, many places, saw many things. Told many stories. In every town, I would find a street corner and tell my stories, and people came. They listened, as I wove the tale of a small boy on a search for his spark.  
The stories never finished, of course. As the sun set and the boy found his spark, the people would always beg me to stay, one more day, please, what was his spark? And I made my excuses, must keep moving, so very sorry, maybe I shall return someday, I must go, so very sorry.  
Every town I passed, the story changed on the surface, but it was fundamentally the same. I began to lose my hope. My spark was nowhere to be found.  
That was when I met a man. I never learned his name, or his hometown. I never saw him again, but that one chance I had, he was standing on a street corner, just like me. He was telling stories, just like me. The people listened, and I did too. He wove the most beautiful tale, that I cannot remember for the life of me, but when he spoke I could see it. His spark. It glowed bright and we gathered around it like moths to a flame. We were enraptured.  
I approached him afterwards, young and shy and infatuated with the tale he spun. I asked him where he had found such stories, where I could find such stories. He looked me up and down and smiled.  
“You have your stories right inside you. All you need is a little water to help them grow.” He gave me the strangest paper—it looked as though it had been ripped from a magazine, a subscription form.  
“When you’re done, fold it into a paper airplane and launch it over the Dull Lake at sunset the next time it rains. With a little bit of luck, and perhaps a little impossibility, it should arrive. How? That, my boy, is far too complicated to explain.”  
He winked and disappeared into the twilight.  
I made my way to the Valley of K, which I’m sure you will have heard about from your father by the time you read this, and not far into spring I stood at the edge of the Dull Lake. It was beautiful, and I sat on that beach and folded my fully filled subscription form into the best paper airplane I’ve ever made, and I waited for the rain.  
As I made my way back to my sad city, I told my stories. I told people of the small boy searching for his spark, and each time it was different, but each time, it was genuine. So many sparks—and the glow of the people was more beautiful than any sunset.  
It was raining, the day I returned to my sad city. I sat on a street corner and told my stories, and the people gathered. The rain seemed to lift away to gloom of the city.  
I hope that someday, you will see the sights I saw for yourself. Perhaps I will take you there one day, or perhaps your father shall. But I am sure that you, too, will find the beauty that we did.  
And until then, I will gladly entrust you the stories I have cultivated.  
Your grandfather,  
Rashid Khalifa


End file.
